Bagels & Biscuits

Do you prefer bagels and cream cheese or biscuits and gravy? Football on Saturdays or Sundays? Big 10 or SEC? The Braves or the Yankees? You know what? It doesn't matter. You can have it all right here.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Moving On....


Well it appears as though the Bay Area in California is about to get a sports makeover. Forget the old stalwart cities of San Francisco and Oakland. It’s time for sports to cash in on the technology- (read cash-) rich Silicon Valley. Earlier this week the Oakland Athletics decided they would no longer be interested in playing in Oakland. Now the 49ers are jumping ship for greener (again read cash) pastures. New cities with richer citizens and deeper pockets are ready to roll out the red carpet to bring in some storied sports franchises. There is only one reason for these moves – money.

The A’s want to go to Fremont. Most people in America have never even heard of Fremont. Apparently it is closer to San Jose than it is to Oakland. Fantastic! Median family income in Fremont? More than $94,000. Median family income in Oakland? A little more than $47,000 – half as much as Fremont.

Santa Clara is more than 30 miles from San Francisco. The median family income in Santa Clara is nearly $82,000. In San Francisco, it is about $73,000. Not a huge difference, but factor in San Francisco refusing to pay for the building of a new stadium at Candlestick Point and Santa Clara willing to chip in some cash for a new stadium and the scales tip toward Santa Clara.

And, it’s not like either of these teams are moving five miles outside the city limits to a suburb or some swampland. This is not a case of the Giants or Jets playing in East Rutherford, N.J. or the Redskins playing in Landover, Maryland. They are moving to other large cities. Fremont has more than 200,000 residents – more than half the size of Oakland. And, Santa Clara has more than 100,000 within its city limits – about 1/7th the size of San Francisco (but still larger than a place called Green Bay – home to another professional football team). The county of Santa Clara tops 1 million residents.

To hell with tradition, because in the end it all comes down to a wise saying that rings truer than ever….It’s all about the Benjamins.

Photo Source: BallparksOfBaseball.com

Monday, November 06, 2006

Blacked Out


When fans across the country wake up Saturday morning and check the local listings for the college football games in their area they might do a double-take or rescan the television schedule just to make sure what they are seeing is, in fact, true.

Is Notre Dame really playing a game that is not being broadcast by a national network or major cable outlet? Will fans of the Fighting Irish really have to make a trek to a sports bar to find that elusive satellite station that is carrying their team's game against Air Force? The answers to both of those questions are yes.

For the first time since 1992, ABC, NBC, CBS or ESPN have declined to broadcast a Notre Dame game. It's been a long time coming for a program that is pampered by the media and has been given special treatment for years by television executives. By having the opportunity to play in front of a national television audience each week, the Fighting Irish have been handed an unfair recruiting advantage that they have somehow squandered for the past 15 years.

Since 1991, no other school has received the type of exposure Notre Dame has. That year, it signed a contract with NBC and the network was awarded the rights to broadcast all Fighting Irish home games. Soon after, viewers around the country began to be fed images of "Touchdown Jesus," the golden dome and the campus buildings on a weekly basis.

People were told about the majesty of Notre Dame and its storied football program. But then something funny started happening. Notre Dame began having some rather unremarkable seasons. The last time the Fighing Irish finished ranked higher than ninth in the Associated Press poll was 1994, which also happens to be the year of Notre Dame's most recent bowl victory. The mystique of the program has been further eroded as it has cycled through five coaches in the last decade (George O'Leary counts).

But despite wallowing in mediocrity for all of these years Notre Dame still has had all of its games carried by national networks. At least that was the case until this week, when CSTV — a small cable station that has 15 million subscribers— was handed the rights to the Air Force-Notre Dame game that is being played in Colorado Springs this Saturday.

For now, fans who hate Notre Dame can rejoice that its streak of national television appearances has finally been broken. But their happiness will be short-lived as the Fighting Irish will play Army on NBC the very next week and their nation of supporters will once again be able to watch its favorite team's games from the comfort of its own homes. And that is too bad.

Photo Source: Fansonly.com

Black is to White as....


Black is to white as…Linda Bruno is to intelligent.

Chance are you have no idea who Linda Bruno is, and even after I explain, you still might not care. But, maybe you’ll at least sympathize with those she is affecting. Bruno is the commissioner of the 14-team Atlantic 10 Conference (don’t even get me started on that – I could wax poetic about how going back to 10 teams, made up of 10 current members would improve this conference drastically).

Well Bruno has decided to sell the conference’s television basketball rights to CSTV. In the A-10, basketball is king. The football conference is Division I-AA, so it’s not a big deal. In the past, the A-10 has run something called A-10 TV, which would produce up to five games a week during conference play. Those games would be aired on local regional sports networks throughout the conference's footprint. For those of you unfamiliar with that footprint, it ranges from Boston down to Charlotte and west into Ohio (plus, as of last year, St. Louis). It was a great set up that allowed for decent exposure of the conference in some major markets.

That is now gone. Instead, Bruno has signed a deal with a fledgling cable sports television network that isn’t available in pretty much the entire footprint of the conference. As the characters in the Guinness commercials are prone to say, “Brilliant!” She single-handedly has removed any television coverage of the conference in the cities where the teams play.

A recent Providence Journal article discusses the fact that the University of Rhode Island is a week away from its season and still is unsure if it will have any games on local television. Cox Cable is the cable provider to pretty much the entire state and they don’t carry CSTV. Part of Bruno’s deal was that CSTV would get exclusive rights, so as of right now there is no way to get even local coverage of the team in its home market.

Bruno’s logic for signing the deal was to get the conference more national television exposure. Well, more nationally televised games are great, except you should take care of your backyard before you go rummaging through your neighbors'.

"I think people are just realizing this has come to light with the start of the basketball season, but we've been working on this since we signed the contract with CSTV," Bruno was quoted as saying in the Providence Journal article.

Way to stay on top of things chief! Presidents of the 14 member-institutions of the A-10 should be calling for her ouster because of this gross failure.

Oh, and if Bruno hasn’t realized it by now, television exposure is one of the best ways for coaches to recruit players, so this year while the A-10 coaches are on the recruiting trail and a potential players asks, “How often are you on TV?” The coach can respond, “Well we aren’t on TV in our own city or in any of our opponents’ cities, but I think some people with satellite dishes get us in Montana.”

“Brilliant!”

Photo Source: Atlantic 10 Conference

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Poll Position



Most people have trouble admitting mistakes. But apparently some of the college coaches and sports reporters who vote in the weekly college football polls really don't like to swallow their pride. This week, West Virginia only dropped seven spots after losing to a Louisville team with an offense that is as dynamic as its defense is porous.

The Mountaineers showed they can compete on the biggest of stages and probably shouldn't be punished too severely for the 44-34 defeat they suffered on Thursday. But do they really deserve to be ranked one spot ahead of Arkansas, the only squad that has remained undefeated in the brutal Southeastern Conference?

Surely not. The Razorbacks' only loss this year came against Southern California in the first game of the season. Meanwhile, Arkansas has defeated No. 5 Auburn in Jordan-Hare Stadium and hung on for a close 26-20 win at South Carolina on Saturday. West Virginia, on the other hand, competes in the decidedly mediocre Big East Conference and has played some rather weak competition. Victories over Marshall, Mississippi State and Syracuse offer no proof that the Mountaineers are worthy of being listed among college football's elite teams.

However, the voters don't seem to care because West Virginia was ranked fifth before the season began and Arkansas wasn't even on the national radar in August. History has shown a team that has been given a certain position in the preseason rankings is handed a much longer leash by the media and the coaches alike when the actual games begin. In other words, you really have to mess up in order to fall far in the polls if you were predicted to be among the best programs in the nation that year. It's why Auburn remains ranked ahead of Arkansas, despite the fact that the Tigers were manhandled by the Razorbacks, 27-10.

We all know college football has a flawed system. But it would be nice to see a little common sense every now and again.